Want to become a billionaire? Up your chances by dropping out of college, working at Goldman Sachs or joining Skull & Bones. http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/106866/Billionaire-Clusters
Well, if these are the numbers, should you stay in college and get a graduate degree from a top school? "More than 55% of them have graduate degrees. Nearly 90% of those with M.B.A.s obtained their master's degree from one of three Ivy League schools: Harvard, Columbia or U. Penn's Wharton School of Business. ...More than 20% of the self-made American moguls on the most recent list of the World's Billionaires never finished college." I would rather have a 55% chance then a 20% chance.
I am going to be rich! My dad was a mechanical engineer and my mother had a small business at one time.
The actual difference is even more stark than that. According to the article, roughly 62 billionaires either dropped out of college or didn't go. Assuming the 55% number with graduate degrees holds as true for the US population as it does for the world's billionaires (the article is not clear on this), then that would indicate about 161 US billionaires with graduate degrees. Take those numbers, and combine them with the number of Americans in their demographic, and you get your "chances" of picking a billionaire at random: 62 / 146,195,000 americans w/o college degree = 0.000042% 161 / 19,365,000 americans w/ "advanced degrees" = 0.00083% Both numbers are incredibly small. But your chances of being a billionaire are 20 times greater if you happen to hold an advanced degree. I'll take my chances with the education, thanks.
There are some people who will say, "Bill Gates dropped out of college and then look at how well he did." etc. etc. I think that there are two types of logical fallacy going on in such a statement (not really my thing, to me it just seems like common sense) The first is something related to the idea that because Billy did it then anyone can do it. That might be true if you had his IQ, drive/ambition, and that little thing that is sometimes called "being in the right place at the right time." There's also a the really silly idea that if some successful person dropped out of college then this means that college is useless for everyone. I'm sure there's a name for this sort of stupid thinking. I might have learned it once in a logic course. It's kind of related to the whole cause-and-effect idea. Anyway, I'd like to suggest that anyone subscribing to this idea should, in fact, just drop out of school and then, in ten years, let us know how that's working out.
